Sergio M.L. Tarrero, BSc

Sergio Martínez de Lahidalga Tarrero, BSc, is a screenwriter and
filmmaker deeply concerned with the institutionally mediated
transmission of socially corrosive beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors.
His abiding interest in the forces that drive people apart,
particularly those deriving from religious doctrine, inspired him from
a young age to ponder what it would take to move people to embrace the
primacy of rational thinking over enculturated dogma. In Sergio’s
view, an important idea to disseminate widely is that an ethical and
contemplative life does not depend on theological postulates.

Although a physicist by training, Sergio has focused professionally on
the creative arts, particularly the worlds of music, film, television
and advertising. He has read extensively about cultural evolution as a
natural phenomenon, driven partly by a Darwinian selection process that
is to a certain extent analogous to that which drives biological
evolution. An epiphany derived from the very source where the term
meme was coined,
Richard Dawkins’ chapter from his classic book
The Selfish Gene: Here on Earth, we alone have the
possibility
to affect
our genetic and memetic replicators, and thus to control our biological
and social evolution with foresight and intelligence.

We
can become
more than the mere vessel for the natural coevolution of our selfish
replicators, our genes and our memes. What each person does with
his/her
time, what he/she learns and thinks, and the ideas he/she helps spread,
evolve or perpetuate, is increasingly important to the outcome of this
huge, multibillion-dimensional matrix. Mass coordination, education,
and mutual respect and support  necessary to promote avoidance of
nationalistic, racial and religious “labels” that accentuate our
adversarial “us vs.them” impulse  are also key to achieving global
peace and the successful coevolution of our planet’s various societal
superorganisms.

Sergio considers that, at this dangerous
historical
juncture, the effective and wise use of mass media and humanitarian
global policies may be the best tools to avert catastrophe. He is of
the opinion that we must not shy away from developing an ongoing
open-minded dialogue with all parties to respectfully but pointedly
critique those ideologies which help create or perpetuate unjust social
conditions, specially human rights abuses, including extreme poverty
and unaccessibility to basic education.

There are obvious challenges for the survival of our species on a world
stage characterized by nuclear, biological and nanotechnological
capabilites. To the extent that ideological differences underlie many
regional conflicts, Sergio believes we should develop our capacity to
engage in a bloodless war of ideas through memetic engineering at many
levels. Global politics could thus become a meme by meme replacement
process involving deployment of new memes via global education through
the mass media including the Internet; cultural and psychological
assistance programs to help the average person deal with the new
realities in an informed manner; logic-based empowerment programs for
effecting social change; and incentives for social diversification,
especially in hotspots characterized by abusive conditions, regimes, or
religions.

In parallel to this, Sergio favors the
development and
rapid deployment of smart technologies to facilitate global monitoring
and vigilance, such as the Lifeboat Foundation’s
SecurityPreserver
proposal, and to engage in both classic top-down surveillance, and
bottom-up sousveillance (that is, surveillance by the citizenry of
those in positions of power). He also advocates the development of the
various other shields proposed by the Lifeboat Foundation, but he is
emphatic about the importance of promptly implementing a Friendly
Artificial Intelligence  the ultimate great attractor that will
help us
avoid existential risks in the long run.

Since 2004, Sergio has been involved in the video archiving and
preservation of seminal events in the fields of nanotechnology
(Foresight Institute) and life extension (Immortality Institute, World
Transhumanist Association). He is also involved in capital development
and fundraising for key business and non-profit organizations,
including the Lifeboat Foundation and the
Machine Intelligence Research
Institute. He has also recently established a
publishing company in Spain in order to disseminate landmark works in
the Spanish speaking world. Among the first books to be published in
Spanish by Editorial Paradigma are
Sam Harris’
The End of Faith and
Letter to a
Christian Nation.